McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945

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perience could be obtained, both ships had successfully completed their

trials at speeds much higher than destroyers equipped with reciprocating

engines, demonstrating the turbine-equipped destroyer’s potential tactical

superiority over existing ships. Surprisingly, however, no additional turbine

orders were placed by the Royal Navy until 1905.

While Parsons was attempting to establish a turbine market in Britain,

the General Electric Company, in the United States, was developing the

Curtis turbine for use in electrical power generation. In 1900, Charles G.

Curtis had approached General Electric with his concept for a more efﬁ-

cient version of the reaction-type steam turbine. Curtis’s design was based

upon impulse theory and offered the potential for increased operating

economy and, perhaps more important, a patentable technology. Curtis

entered an agreement with General Electric that stipulated the develop-

ment of a working prototype within three years. Failure to do so would re-

quire General Electric to relinquish all rights to his design. If development

was successful, Curtis would retain the rights to all nonelectrical uses of

his turbine, a factor that became important during the 1917 controversy

over electric battleship propulsion.

Development of the GE-Curtis turbine proceeded slowly, forcing GE

Vice President for Engineering E. W. Rice Jr. to bring in one of his most

successful engineers, William Le Roy Emmet. After reviewing the GE-

Curtis developmental effort, Emmet reported that the Curtis turbine had

tremendous potential for use in large, central-power generating stations

and should be pursued. As a reward for his vision, Emmet was tasked with

completing the Curtis turbine for General Electric.

Emmet, an 1881 graduate of the line ofﬁcer curriculum at the Naval

Academy, was a self-taught electrical engineer. Under the provisions of the

August 1882 appropriations act, Emmet’s poor class standing had left him

without a commission after his graduation cruise was completed in 1883.

Fascinated by electricity, he used his aggressiveness to win a job installing

streetcar systems for fellow Naval Academy alumnus Frank J. Sprague.

From there, Emmet went to work for the Edison General Electric Com-

pany in Chicago, where he was introduced to Thomas Edison’s systems ap-

proach to electrical power generation.

After the merger with Thomson-

Houston, Emmet moved to Schenectady as an employee of the new

General Electric Company, where his ﬁrst major accomplishment was

winning a large share of the Niagara Falls alternating current generating

station contract from rival Westinghouse in 1894.

Technological Change and the United States Navy

Emmet and Curtis developed a large-capacity turbine that was more ef-

ﬁcient than the Parsons reaction turbine and which threatened Parsons’s

position within the U.S. turbine market. A 5,000 kw GE-Curtis impulse

turbine was installed in Consolidated Edison’s Fisk Street Station in

Chicago in October 1903.

General Electric extended its challenge to Par-

sons by concluding a development agreement and worldwide market divi-

sion of the GE-Curtis turbine with Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft

(AEG) the same year.

In Britain, Parsons remained one of two principal

manufacturers of equipment for electrical generating plants until World

War I.

Nevertheless, while Parsons shared the British domestic-power

market, he had established a virtual monopoly over the marine turbine

market in Britain, continental Europe, and Japan.

By 1905, many navies were considering the marine turbine as a re-

placement for the reciprocating steam engine in warships. Responding to

British naval interest in turbines, the U.S. Navy signed contracts for the

construction of three cruisers in 1905, one to be equipped with Parsons tur-

bines, one with Curtis turbines, and one with traditional reciprocating

steam engines to compare their relative economies.

Based upon these

1905 cruiser trials, the U.S. Navy decided to accept the steam turbine as the

prime mover in its capital ships.

Attracted by the compact size of the tur-

bine, and undoubtedly copying Fisher’s turbine-propelled Dreadnought,

the navy selected U.S.-built Curtis turbines for its ﬁrst true dreadnought

battleship, USS North Dakota, in 1907. Parsons turbines were rejected

since they required an engine room 24 feet longer than the Curtis instal-

lation.

Unfortunately for Curtis, deterioration of the turbine steam noz-

zles adversely affected the performance of his turbines and resulted in the

utilization of Parsons turbines in the next four U.S. battleships.

The Par-

sons turbines did not deteriorate during use, but their relative inefﬁciency

reduced the battleships’ steaming range. This led to a reversion to the more

economical, and strategically consonant, reciprocating engines in the two

New York–class dreadnoughts of the 1910 Program.

Attacking the Reverse Salient:

Increasing Turbine Efﬁciency

Widespread acceptance of the marine turbine depended upon the de-

velopment of a means to optimize the existing turbine-propeller system.

Technological Trajectory

Until this could be accomplished, the turbine would be limited to ships re-

quiring high-speed operation—warships and passenger liners. However, in

the U.S. Navy, where speed took second place to propulsion economy, high

speed was not a primary design criterion. In America, the turbine’s position

was precarious, as demonstrated by its exclusion from the battleships of the

1910 Program.

Hydrodynamic limitations on propeller design shifted the focus for im-

proved propulsive efﬁciency onto the turbine. To regain the U.S. naval

market in 1909–10, the turbine manufacturers increased the diameter of

their turbines, reducing their rotative speed while maintaining the same

level of power output.

Although reduced to several hundred rotations per

minute, the turbine still operated at too high a speed for optimum propeller

efﬁciency. Overall propulsive efﬁciency, which translated into fuel econ-

omy and long-range operations, still remained less than for a reciprocating

steam-powered ship, but was offset, to a point, by the turbine’s compact size

that allowed for increased coal bunkerage and improvements in other ship

systems.

To solve the problem of low propulsive efﬁciency and propeller cavita-

tion, marine engineers pursued three paths to develop a speed-reducing de-

vice to operate between the high-speed turbine and an optimized, low-

speed propeller. The ﬁrst system was the mechanical reduction gear,

pursued in Britain and the United States. The second system was the tur-

boelectric drive, an idea investigated in Britain, Germany, and the United

States. The third system was the hydraulic speed reduction, the Föttinger

Transformer, developed in Germany.

In 1904, a consortium had been formed by Charles Parsons, George

Westinghouse, former U.S. Navy Engineer-in-Chief George Melville, and

John MacAlpine, a marine engineer. Their goal was the development of a

suitable mechanical reduction gear.

Metallurgical and machining difﬁ-

culties precluded producing geometrically accurate gear teeth able to with-

stand the tremendous pressure and torque required for use with steam tur-

bines. Melville and MacAlpine thought they could bypass this problem by

designing a reduction gear that incorporated a “ﬂoating frame.” Reﬁne-

ment of the design was retarded by the adverse economic climate of 1907

that forced George Westinghouse to reduce his funding for the project.

Drawing upon British expertise in metalworking, Parsons indepen-

dently pursued a ﬁxed-frame, high-tolerance mechanical reduction gear

assembly. This type of gearing required accurate machining technology

Technological Change and the United States Navy

and it was not until 1910, almost thirteen years after Turbinia’s success, that

the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company was ﬁnally able to develop

and test a ﬁxed-frame, experimental reduction gear in the 1,000 hp propul-

sion plant of SS Vespasian.

Around the same time, a Professor Föttinger produced a hydraulic speed

reduction device in Germany. Föttinger had originally developed an elec-

tromagnetic transmission system that provided an overall power transmis-

sion efﬁciency of 87 percent (compared with 60 percent in direct-drive tur-

bines), but was abandoned due to its complexity and expense. Föttinger

had more success with his next design, the hydraulic transformer, in which

the turbine shaft rotated a waterwheel that forced water through a set of

guide blades onto a larger waterwheel attached to the propeller shaft. This

Föttinger Transformer, coupled to an AEG-Curtis turbine, was tested at the

Vulcan Shipbuilding Company power plant for fourteen months before be-

ing installed in a specially built test boat in 1910.

While Westinghouse, Parsons, and Föttinger worked on mechanical

and hydraulic methods of speed reduction, William Le Roy Emmet, mo-

tivated by an idea advanced by the electrical inventor Reginald Fessenden,

proposed the turboelectric ship propulsion system to eliminate the inefﬁ-

ciency of the directly connected marine steam turbine.

Emmet had been

quite successful in the development and marketing of the GE-Curtis tur-

bogenerator system within the American electrical power industry. How-

ever, the electrical industry could only absorb a limited number of turbo-

generators. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was a growing organization

and a wealthy potential customer and Emmet sought to extend his entre-

preneurial success, for General Electric, to this new and lucrative mar-

ket.

To break into the battleship propulsion market, General Electric had

to compete against the Melville–MacAlpine gear of the Westinghouse Ma-

chine Company, and overcome the inﬂuence of the private shipyards that

were Parsons licensees and advocates of the directly connected turbine

drive.

A Hard Sell: The U.S. Navy and

the Turboelectric Drive

The navy had previously rejected turboelectric propulsion when Fes-

senden proposed its use in 1908.

The Board on Construction thought the

Technological Trajectory

electric drive too experimental to risk its installation in a battleship.

Fes-

senden received permission to approach the “engineers of any manufac-

turing companies” provided he made it clear that there was no navy inter-

est or sponsorship involved. Westinghouse and Allis-Chalmers rejected

him outright, while Emmet at General Electric investigated Fessenden’s

proposal thoroughly.

Emmet immediately saw the merit in Fessenden’s idea. Pointing out the

differences between General Electric’s proven technology and the paper

theories of Fessenden, Emmet wrote the secretary of the navy that the GE

plan for electric warship propulsion “involves no feature which is not

already an accomplished fact.”

The new secretary of the navy, George

von L. Meyer, directed the Bureau of Steam Engineering to investigate the

GE proposal for battleship propulsion.

The navy’s inspector of equipment at GE-Schenectady, Lieutenant

Commander J. McNamee, enthusiastically outlined the strategic value of

the turboelectric system to the Navy Department: “[the electric drive] so

far exceeded the economy of the Parsons system, that there can be no doubt

that upon the completion of these vessels [battleships Wyoming and

Arkansas], involving an expenditure of 20 million ($20,000,000) dollars,

they will be so deﬁcient in steaming radius, compared to what they might

have been [with an electric propulsion system], as to cause the gravest con-

cern.” McNamee also raised the specter of loss of the electric drive to the

rival Royal Navy, arguing that adoption of the electric drive in British

dreadnoughts would render the latest American battleships “in a strategic

sense, perilously near the category of lame ducks.”

Ofﬁcers in the Bureau of Steam Engineering attributed Commander

McNamee’s enthusiasm to his close working relationship with General

Electric and made no effort to speed up their evaluation. After four months

of waiting, a discouraged Emmet, used to the quicker pace of the business

world, expressed his frustration to his Naval Academy classmate, Con-

gressman John W. Weeks: “Such improvements as I offer will never be re-

alized unless somebody pushes them. Humanity is so constituted that nine

out of ten men devote much of their time opposing or discouraging such

things.”

His patience exhausted, Emmet gave the system a push. He per-

suaded his brother-in-law, who regularly socialized with Secretary Meyer

at the Harvard Club, to write Meyer portraying Emmet as a respected Gen-

eral Electric engineer, not a mere “promoter.”

This may have had some

effect, as the chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering soon reported fa-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

vorably, but cautiously, on the potential of the electric drive to Secretary

Meyer.

Engineer-in-Chief Hutch Cone was a progressively minded ofﬁcer

whose support for William Sims in 1908 reﬂected the blurring of old alle-

giances in the amalgamated ofﬁcer corps.

Despite his “revolutionary”

past, Cone was a cautious engineer who was unwilling to accept Emmet’s

claims at face value. Cone recommended that the turboelectric drive be

tested in some “unimportant vessel” such as the cruiser Baltimore or in one

One of New Mexico’s electric main propulsion motors (left) illustrating the direct

connection to one of the ships four propeller shafts (right). (Courtesy of General

Electric Co., ca. 1920. Naval Historical Center, NH 75106)

Image not available.

of the new colliers to be built the following year.

Emmet feared these

ships would not provide a fair evaluation of his system, which was designed

for a large battleship.

Since the Board on Construction had recently rejected Fessenden’s tur-

boelectric drive, Secretary Meyer, as a favor to Emmet’s brother-in-law,

used the conditional endorsement of the engineer-in-chief to bypass the

board and refer the question of turboelectric propulsion to the line ofﬁcers

on the General Board. The General Board, demonstrating its new inﬂu-

ence over naval technology, recommended installing the General Electric

system in one of three new colliers.

The collier construction program of 1911 was analogous to the cruiser

propulsion trials of 1905, pitting Emmet’s GE turboelectric drive against a

new Westinghouse-backed system with the Melville–MacAlpine reduc-

tion gear. A third collier was equipped with a diesel submarine engine from

the Electric Boat Company.

The entire ﬁnancial risk of the experiment

was carried by the competing companies: “in the case of failure of the ex-

perimental installation, the builders of this machinery [General Electric

and Westinghouse] would receive no payment, and the entire cost of its

removal, and the preparations of the foundations to receive reciprocating

engines would be borne by them.”

Emmet, drawing upon his experience in developing electrical systems,

fabricated and thoroughly tested the complete electric drive, including all

nonelectrical auxiliary machinery, at GE-Schenectady.

Growing more

concerned that the collier’s small-horsepower requirements would not

properly demonstrate the large-horsepower efﬁciency of the turboelectric

drive, Emmet again offered the turboelectric drive to the navy for use in

new battleship construction.

When the secretary’s ofﬁce directed the bu-

reaus to reconsider the turboelectric drive for battleship use, Engineer-in-

Chief Cone stood ﬁrm in his opinion that the suitability of the turboelec-

tric drive could only be judged after the completion of the collier tests.

Emmet decided to pressure the navy by embarking upon a publicity

campaign to sell the GE turboelectric drive to merchant marine operators

and to the public. Speaking before local engineering societies, he made

much of the turboelectric propulsion system selected for the collier Jupiter.

Emphasizing the light weight of the electric drive, Emmet claimed, with

some exaggeration, that a comparable 30,000 hp turboelectric drive would

weigh only one-tenth that of the Parsons direct-drive machinery installed

in the new passenger liner, Lusitania. He also stated that the turboelectric

Technological Change and the United States Navy

100

drive could save a ship owner at least $20,000 per year on fuel. Not one to

let sleeping dogs lie, Emmet blasted the navy, claiming that a turboelec-

trically propelled battleship of the Wyoming class could steam two-thirds

of the way around the world on a single coaling. Emmet won many ad-

herents and the partisan Electrical World trumpeted “that a great ﬁeld for

electrical service is close at hand.”

Despite Emmet’s publicity blitz, the navy announced that the new su-

perdreadnought Pennsylvania would be equipped with Parsons direct-drive

turbines and a small-horsepower Parsons cruising turbine ﬁtted with a re-

duction gear. Emmet protested vigorously to the new secretary of the navy,

Josephus Daniels, characterizing the continuation of direct-drive turbines

as a serious mistake in U.S. battleship design. Through Emmet, General

Electric even offered to guarantee a $350,000 electric drive installation in

Pennsylvania.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt rejected

the General Electric offer, supporting the position of the Bureau of Steam

Engineering. Its new chief, Rear Admiral Robert Grifﬁn, believed, like his

predecessor, Cone, that the electric drive must ﬁrst prove itself in a collier

before it could be considered for use in a battleship. Grifﬁn wryly remarked

that although there was talk in the press about the widespread use of the

electric drive, so far the U.S. Navy appeared to be its only customer.

Bristling at Grifﬁn’s criticism, Emmet condemned the bureau engineers:

“The methods proposed are entirely outside the experience of naval ofﬁ-

cers and I do not expect their technical indorsement.” Ignoring the pecu-

niary basis of General Electric–navy relations, Emmet wrote to Roosevelt,

“I have no ﬁnancial interest in this matter and am simply seeking to be use-

ful and to extend the uses of electricity.”

The report of the Jupiter trials, ﬁnally published in May 1914, justiﬁed

Emmet’s claims for the electric drive. Jupiter’s chief engineer, Lieutenant

S. M. Robinson, reported that the turboelectric drive was easily operated

by relatively unskilled sailors, provided for accurate speed control, and,

most important, exceeded General Electric’s guaranteed economy predic-

tions by a phenomenal 18 percent.

Emmet’s thoroughness in land-testing the complete turboelectric drive

system had paid off. The rival Westinghouse Melville–MacAlpine reduc-

tion gear system in the collier USS Neptune had failed its trial. Ironically,

the problem was not centered in the reduction gear, but in a new turbine

bine-control system designed by George Westinghouse to allow direct en-

Technological Trajectory

101

gine control from the bridge.

The third collier, Maumee, did not perform

anywhere near expectations and the diesel engine was rejected.

In 1915 the U.S. Navy was faced with a choice between the proven suc-

cess and economy of the turboelectric drive, the trouble-plagued Westing-

house Melville–MacAlpine reduction gear system, or a continuation of the

inefﬁcient direct-drive turbine augmented by a small reduction gear-

equipped cruising turbine, ﬁrst introduced in 1912. To the ofﬁcers of

the Bureau of Steam Engineering, the geopolitical realities of the Paciﬁc

component of U.S. naval strategic doctrine made the choice clear. In April

1915 Secretary Daniels announced the selection of the General Electric sys-

tem to power the new superdreadnought California.

The 1917 Electric Drive Controversy

The shipbuilding industry, which manufactured the direct-drive turbine

propulsion systems under license, did not protest the selection of the elec-

tric drive for California as two sister ships, Idaho and Mississippi,

were to

be ﬁtted with the shipyard-built, 1912-style Parsons and Curtis geared-cruis-

ing-turbine systems. Attacks on turboelectric propulsion only began in

earnest when it was announced that all sixteen superdreadnoughts of the

$588 million 1916 Program would be equipped with turboelectric drives.

This stripped the shipbuilding industry of the proﬁts that could have been

derived from the manufacture of direct-drive propulsion components for

this new generation of American capital ships.

With turboelectric propulsion, the capital ships of the 1916 Program pos-

sessed superior fuel economy and the small size of the propulsion compo-

nents allowed for greater internal subdivision of the hull. This enhanced the

survivability of the propulsion system in particular and the ship overall in

the face of the new nemesis of the European War, the submarine-launched

torpedo. In addition, the navy maintained that turboelectric propulsion was

less costly to acquire and that it had shaved $200,000 from the cost of Cali-

fornia, a ﬁgure disputed by the shipbuilding industry.

Even at this early

stage, a necessary selling point for a new military technology was its acqui-

sition cost. A blind eye was turned to operational (“life-cycle”) cost—a con-

tinuing legacy of the annual congressional budgetary process.

In keeping with American design practice, which made speed subsidiary

to large guns and maximum armor, the battleships of the 1916 Program still

Technological Change and the United States Navy

102

had a respectable top speed of 21 knots. This speed required a turbine de-

livering a little more than 7,000 hp per propeller shaft, which was within

the capability of the turbines used in domestic electric power plants. As a

result, the decision to install the electric drive in the battleships was read-

ily defensible from a technical standpoint. The six battlecruisers, on the

other hand, were designed to reach speeds of 33 knots requiring a total of

180,000 hp, or 45,000 hp per propeller shaft, almost a sevenfold power in-

crease over the battleships. The mechanical lobby focused their attack on

the battlecruiser design.

The private shipyards indirectly protested the selection of the electric

drive by submitting inﬂated construction bids for the 1916 Program battle-

ships, citing the uncertainty of working with the unfamiliar turboelectric

drive.

Less charitable assessments within the Navy Department attrib-

uted the high bids to the loss of revenue caused by the elimination of the

shipyard-built, direct-drive turbines. Conferences between the shipyards

and Secretary Daniels ﬁnally resulted in battleship contract awards in De-

cember 1916. Newport News Shipbuilding Company agreed to build two

battleships, using GE turboelectric machinery, for $22.4 million. A similar

agreement was reached with New York Shipbuilding to build two battle-

ships using electric drives constructed by the Westinghouse Electric Man-

ufacturing Company.

The risk inherent in the large power requirements of the battlecruisers

was used to justify even higher bids for the ﬁrst four ships to be contracted.

The navy had estimated building costs for each of the battlecruisers at $20.4

million, twice that of a single battleship. The 1916 Naval Appropriations Act

authorized the award of cost plus ﬁxed-percentage-proﬁt contracts and the

bids received from the four private shipyards were all on this basis, with

proﬁts ranging between 10 percent and 15 percent, but on top of a higher

base cost than the navy estimate.

While the Bureau of Construction & Repair reviewed the battlecruiser

bids, its chief, Rear Admiral David Taylor, conﬁrmed to the House of Rep-

resentatives that half the battlecruisers’ boilers would be located above the

main armored deck. This apparent defect was added to the list of com-

plaints about the electric drive. The exposed boilers and the large power

output required of the electric drive were disparaged in the New York Times

by Schuyler Wheeler, an electrical engineer with links to the private ship-

yards. Three days later the paper printed a list of electrical engineering ex-

perts, including Michael Pupin, opposed to the electric drive.

Technological Trajectory

103